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Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy Hardcover – September 15, 2020
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“[An] immensely exciting, fast-moving account.”—The Washington Post
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Foreign Affairs • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal
In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.
They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.
This true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named “Sonya.” Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI—and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century—between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy—and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.
With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has conjured a page-turning history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateSeptember 15, 2020
- Dimensions6.46 x 1.37 x 9.68 inches
- ISBN-100593136306
- ISBN-13978-0593136300
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Macintyre is fastidious about tradecraft details. . . . [He] has become the preeminent popular chronicler of British intelligence history because he understands the essence of the business.”—David Ignatius, The Washington Post
“Macintyre writes with novelistic flair.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Macintyre is a superb writer, with an eye for the telling detail as fine as any novelist’s.”—The Dallas Morning News
“Macintyre is one of the most gifted espionage writers around.”—Annie Jacobsen, author of Area 51 and Operation Paperclip
“Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller.”—John Banville, The Guardian (UK)
“With Macintyre in charge, you’re virtually guaranteed a history book that reads like a spy novel.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“A scrupulous and insightful writer—a master historian.”—Alan Furst, author of Mission to Paris
“Macintyre is a master at leading the reader down some very tortuous paths while ensuring they never lose their bearings.”—Evening Standard (UK)
“Macintyre . . . has that enviable gift, the inability to write a dull sentence.”—The Spectator (UK)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Whirl
On May 1, 1924, a Berlin policeman smashed his rubber truncheon into the back of a sixteen-year-old girl, and helped to forge a revolutionary.
For several hours, thousands of Berliners had been trooping through the city streets in the May Day parade, the annual celebration of the working classes. Their number included many communists, including a large youth delegation. These wore red carnations, carried placards declaring “Hands Off Soviet Russia,” and sang communist songs: “We are the Blacksmiths of the Red Future / Our Spirit is Strong / We Hammer out the Keys to Happiness.” The government had banned political demonstrations, and police lined the streets, watching sullenly. A handful of fascist brownshirts gathered on a corner to jeer. Scuffles broke out. A bottle sailed through the air. The communists sang louder.
At the head of the communist youth group marched a slim girl wearing a worker’s cap, two weeks short of her seventeenth birthday. This was Ursula Kuczynski’s first street demonstration, and her eyes shone with excitement as she waved her placard and belted out the anthem: “Auf, auf, zum Kampf,” rise up, rise up for the struggle. They called her “Whirl,” and, as she strode along and sang, Ursula performed a little dance of pure joy.
The parade was turning onto Mittelstrasse when the police charged. She remembered a “squeal of car brakes that drowned out the singing, screams, police whistles and shouts of protest. Young people were thrown to the ground, and dragged into trucks.” In the tumult, Ursula was sent sprawling on the pavement. She looked up to find a burly policeman towering over her. There were sweat patches under the arms of his green uniform. The man grinned, raised his truncheon, and brought it down with all his force into the small of her back.
Her first sensation was one of fury, followed by the most acute pain she had ever experienced. “It hurt so much I couldn’t breathe properly.” A young communist friend named Gabo Lewin dragged her into a doorway. “It’s all right, Whirl,” he said, as he rubbed her back where the baton had struck. “You will get through this.” Ursula’s group had dispersed. Some were under arrest. But several thousand more marchers were approaching up the wide street. Gabo pulled Ursula to her feet and handed her one of the fallen placards. “I continued with the demonstration,” she later wrote, “not knowing yet that it was a decision for life.”
Ursula’s mother was furious when her daughter staggered home that night, her clothes torn, a livid black bruise spreading across her back.
Berta Kuczynski demanded to know what Ursula was doing, “roaming the streets arm in arm with a band of drunken teenagers and yelling at the top of her voice.”
“We weren’t drunk and we weren’t yelling,” Ursula retorted.
“Who are these teenagers?” Berta demanded. “What do you mean by hanging around with these kinds of people?”
“ ‘These kinds of people’ are the local branch of the young communists. I’m a member.”
Berta sent Ursula straight to her father’s study.
“I respect every person’s right to his or her opinion,” Robert Kuczynski told his daughter. “But a seventeen-year-old girl is not mature enough to commit herself politically. I therefore ask you emphatically to return the membership card and delay your decision a few years.”
Ursula had her answer ready. “If seventeen-year-olds are old enough to work and be exploited, then they are also old enough to fight against exploitation . . . and that’s exactly why I have become a communist.”
Robert Kuczynski was a communist sympathizer, and he rather admired his daughter’s spirit, but Ursula was clearly going to be a handful. The Kuczynskis might support the struggle of the working classes, but that did not mean they wanted their daughter mixing with them.
This political radicalism was just a passing fad, Robert told Ursula. “In five years you’ll laugh about the whole thing.”
She shot back: “In five years I want to be a doubly good communist.”
The Kuczynski family was rich, influential, contented, and, like every other Jewish household in Berlin, utterly unaware that within a few years their world would be swept away by war, revolution, and systematic genocide. In 1924, Berlin contained 160,000 Jews, roughly a third of Germany’s Jewish population.
Robert René Kuczynski (a name hard to spell but easy to pronounce: ko-chin-ski) was Germany’s most distinguished demographic statistician, a pioneer in using numerical data to frame social policies. His method for calculating population statistics—the “Kuczynski rate”—is still in use today. Robert’s father, a successful banker and president of the Berlin Stock Exchange, bequeathed to his son a passion for books and the money to indulge it. A gentle, fussy scholar, the proud descendant of “six generations of intellectuals,” Kuczynski owned the largest private library in Germany.
In 1903, Robert married Berta Gradenwitz, another product of the German Jewish commercial intelligentsia, the daughter of a property developer. Berta was an artist, clever and indolent. Ursula’s earliest memories of her mother were composed of colors and textures: “Everything shimmering brown and gold. The velvet, her hair, her eyes.” Berta was not a talented painter but no one had told her, and so she happily daubed away, devoted to her husband but delegating the tiresome day-to-day business of childcare to servants. Cosmopolitan and secular, the Kuczynskis considered themselves German first and Jewish a distant second. They often spoke English or French at home.
The Kuczynskis knew everyone who was anyone in Berlin’s left-wing intellectual circles: the Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht, the artists Käthe Kollwitz and Max Liebermann, and Walther Rathenau, the German industrialist and future foreign minister. Albert Einstein was one of Robert’s closest friends. On any given evening, a cluster of artists, writers, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals, Jew and gentile alike, gathered around the Kuczynski dining table. Precisely where Robert stood in Germany’s bewildering political kaleidoscope was both debatable and variable. His views ranged from left of center to far left, but Robert was slightly too elevated a figure, in his own mind, to be tied down by mere party labels. As Rathenau waspishly observed: “Kuczynski always forms a one-man party and then situates himself on its left wing.” For sixteen years he held the post of director of the Statistical Office in the borough of Berlin-Schöneberg, a light burden that left plenty of time for producing academic papers, writing articles for left-wing newspapers, and participating in socially progressive campaigns, notably to improve living conditions in Berlin’s slums (which he may or may not have visited).
Ursula Maria was the second of Robert and Berta’s six children. The first, born three years before her in 1904, was Jürgen, the only boy of the brood. Four sisters would follow Ursula: Brigitte (1910), Barbara (1913), Sabine (1919), and Renate (1923). Brigitte was Ursula’s favorite sister, the closest to her in age and politics. There was never any doubt that the male child stood foremost in rank: Jürgen was precocious, clever, highly opinionated, spoiled rotten, and relentlessly patronizing to his younger sisters. He was Ursula’s confidant and unstated rival. Describing him as “the best and cleverest person I know,” she adored and resented Jürgen in equal measure.
In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, the Kuczynskis moved into a large villa on Schlachtensee lake in the exclusive Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, on the edge of the Grunewald forest. The property, still standing today, was built on land bequeathed by Berta’s father. Its spacious grounds swept down to the water, with an orchard, woodland, and a hen coop. An extension was added to accommodate Robert’s library. The Kuczynskis employed a cook, a gardener, two more house servants, and, most important, a nanny.
Olga Muth, known as Ollo, was more than just a member of the family. She was its bedrock, providing dull, daily stability, strict rules, and limitless affection. The daughter of a sailor in the kaiser’s fleet, Ollo had been orphaned at the age of six and brought up in a Prussian military orphanage, a place of indescribable brutality that left her with a damaged soul, a large heart, and a firm sense of discipline. A bustling, energetic, sharp-tongued woman, Ollo was thirty in 1911 when she began work as a nursemaid in the Kuczynski household.
Ollo understood children far better than Berta, and had perfected techniques for reminding her of this: the nanny waged a quiet war against Frau Kuczynski, punctuated by furious rows during which she usually stormed out, always to return. Ursula was Ollo’s favorite. The girl feared the dark, and while the dinner parties were in full swing downstairs, Muth’s gentle lullabies soothed her to sleep. Years later, Ursula came to realize that Ollo’s love was partly motivated by a “partisanship with me against mother, in that silent, jealous struggle.”
Product details
- Publisher : Crown; First Edition (September 15, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0593136306
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593136300
- Item Weight : 1.45 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.46 x 1.37 x 9.68 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #78,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #52 in Espionage True Accounts
- #79 in Intelligence & Espionage History
- #95 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.
(Photo Credit: Justine Stoddart)
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the story compelling and gripping. They appreciate the meticulous research and well-documented understory. Readers describe the female spy as interesting and fascinating. The book is described as thrilling and fun, with a fast-paced narrative. However, opinions differ on the character study - some find it interesting and great, while others feel it's too self-centered.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the story engaging and gripping. They appreciate the accurate writing and detailed descriptions of people's psychology. Readers find the portrayal of a complex and sympathetic Soviet spy fascinating, despite moral discrepancies. The book contains an insightful study of official Soviet, German, British, and American records from over 35 years.
"...I will be enjoying a well written, well researched, fascinating chronicle of modern espionage...." Read more
"History that reads like a novel. What an amazing cast of characters from history...." Read more
"My friend liked the book! Said it was good reading!" Read more
"...We’ll never know. A great read, chock full of exceptionally interesting characters like Agnes Smedley, Richard Sorge and Sandro Rado and..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's research quality. They find it meticulously researched and well-documented. The biographical details are detailed and interesting. The summary at the end is helpful.
"...certain in the knowledge that I will be enjoying a well written, well researched, fascinating chronicle of modern espionage...." Read more
"...in obtaining secrets re building the atomic bomb and her personal life also is interesting if not amazing...." Read more
"...Very well researched and documented...." Read more
"...Ursula is brilliant, brave and resourceful and a woman of her convictions. However, I found the writing rather plodding and long winded...." Read more
Customers find the book's female spy interesting and full of intrigue. They say the book provides a real sense of the woman, her motivations, and details about her life. Readers also describe her as brilliant, brave, resourceful, and a woman of her convictions.
"...This is the story of the female spy Ursula Kuczynski. And what a story!..." Read more
"Well told, and easy to follow biography of Ursula Kuckynski, “Sonja” a lucky, effective and female Soviet spy...." Read more
"Excellent research and a cast of compelling characters. Ursula is brilliant, brave and resourceful and a woman of her convictions...." Read more
"...fiction, but this true, well documented history, of Ursula Kuczynski is fascinating and full of intrigue...." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's thrill. They find it fast-paced and fun, with a slow start that turns into an exciting ride.
"...Like the writer’s other books about espionage and spies, it is thrilling - and can be read like a thriller...." Read more
"This book begins slowly, but then take es you on a wild ride with one of the for most spies for the Soviet Union." Read more
"I have read four other books that were well written and exciting. This title, Agent Sonya, was not up to your standards...." Read more
"Great read. Fast-paced and fun." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's fast-paced and thrilling story. They find it starts slowly but then takes them on a wild ride.
"...books about espionage and spies, it is thrilling - and can be read like a thriller. This is biography writing at its best...." Read more
"This book begins slowly, but then take es you on a wild ride with one of the for most spies for the Soviet Union." Read more
"...Solid history with novelistic pace." Read more
"Great read. Fast-paced and fun." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the book's pacing. Some find it well-written and engaging, while others find the writing boring and tiresome after a while. The first few pages may be hard to get into for some readers.
"...it right away, certain in the knowledge that I will be enjoying a well written, well researched, fascinating chronicle of modern espionage...." Read more
"...This is biography writing at its best. The writer paints the big canvas: Here is drama, passion, fear, paranoia, deception, danger...." Read more
"...for reading with so much more social media - it was hard to get into the fist few pages - too much history for my liking" Read more
"...Macintyre includes detailed end notes for each chapter. He provides photos of Ursula, her family, handlers and assets...." Read more
Customers have different views on the character study. Some find it engaging and interesting, with many pictures of main characters. Others feel it's too focused on personal details and not useful for understanding the story.
"History that reads like a novel. What an amazing cast of characters from history...." Read more
"...We’ll never know. A great read, chock full of exceptionally interesting characters like Agnes Smedley, Richard Sorge and Sandro Rado and..." Read more
"...media - it was hard to get into the fist few pages - too much history for my liking" Read more
"...Agent Sonya - lover, mother, soldier, spy - is an extremely good biography. Macintyre has written several biographies about famous spies...." Read more
Reviews with images
Exciting, page turner about Soviet intelligence
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2020When I see Ben Macintyre's name on a new book I buy it and start reading it right away, certain in the knowledge that I will be enjoying a well written, well researched, fascinating chronicle of modern espionage. Agent Sonya is a worthy successor to such brilliant Macintyre works as The Spy and the Traitor and A Spy Among Friends, with a critical difference: the major protagonist is female.
Ursula Kuczynski was a member of a prominent and wealthy German Jewish family active in Berlin's intellectual and artistic circles. In her childhood she lived through Germany's defeat in World War I, and as a teenager she witnessed the mounting tensions and rising anti-Semitism that led to the fall of the Weimar Republic and its replacement with Hitler's Third Reich. Like many in her generation Ursula became a Communist, not so much for ideological reasons as because she saw the Soviet Union as the strongest enemy of Fascism. Helped by her family's left-wing connections, Ursula journeyed to the Soviet Union, was recruited as a spy by Stalin's many-tentacled intelligence services, and spent years in Shanghai, Mukden, Moscow, Switzerland, and eventually rural England on various espionage assignments using the code name Sonya. Along the way she had a passionate affair with another Soviet spy, Richard Sorge, married or lived with three different men by whom she had three children, and jumped from one hair raising adventure to another. Her sex was an asset, since the Soviet and other intelligence services with whom she dealt were all highly male chauvinistic, and she was able to fly under the radar for many years, seeming to be nothing more than a nice normal wife and mother. Her most important contribution to the Soviet espionage effort was her connection with the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who passed an enormous amount of information on British and American efforts to build an atomic bomb through her to the Kremlin. Eventually, after Fuchs was exposed and arrested, Ursula and her family escaped to East Germany, where she lived for most of the rest of her life.
Ursula's story seems too incredible even for the pages of a Fleming or Deighton spy thriller, but it all really happened, making Macintyre's extensively documented tale just as riveting as any James Bond adventure. If after reading Agent Sonya you are hungry for more such tales, I can recommend any of Macintyre's books, most especially A Spy Among Friends, which is about Kim Philby, another Soviet spy with whom Ursula had an indirect connection.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2024History that reads like a novel. What an amazing cast of characters from history. One anachronism that I noticed on page 153 when in 1938 Ursula turns on her transistor radio. The transistor was not invented until 1947 and the first radios came on the market in 1954. Most spies could not secretly use a large tube radio of the time and often used crystal radios.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2025Great true story…what a life!
- Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2025Good values, great seller A+++
- Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2024My friend liked the book! Said it was good reading!
- Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2023A welm written book. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2021I have read most of Macintyre’s books and they are all gripping.
I found Agent Sonya a little more difficult to get into but once I did it did not disappoint. I have read reviews that have criticized the book for its subject matter. How can we relate to a Soviet spy? How can we feel anything for someone who worked for Stalin against the West? I think that is an over simplification.
I tried to put myself in the shoes of Ursula Maria Kuczynski, a young German Jew horrified at the rise of fascism in Europe in the 20’s and 30’s. Like Ursula I would like to think that I would do all I could to resist and to fight. The natural vehicle for Ursula to travel in to conduct that fight was the communist party and she joined in 1926, just as Hitler was rising to prominence.
European communists fought fascism in Spain, Germany, the Far East and Eastern Europe and were a major part of the French resistance. Ursula becomes a committed communist (and anti fascist) and an accomplished asset as we follow her from Germany to China and thereafter to Switzerland and finally to the UK.
This is where the story becomes a little muddy for many. Yes, Ursula spied for Stalin, a man as despotic and evil as Hitler. But at that time Churchill and Roosevelt were working with the Soviet leader and we were allies.
Ursula spied against the Nazi’s for the Soviets while in the UK but she also helped to infiltrate communist spies into the US atomic weapons program. In doing so she helped the Soviets to develop their own atomic bomb. Obviously this puts her beyond the pale for many people but the world was a different place 60 and 70 years ago. Who knows, without Ursula maybe we would not have had a world where both sides of the Cold War had the means to totally annihilate the other? Maybe in that scenario, without the promise of “mutually assured destruction”, a Nixon or a Reagan or, heaven forbid, a Trump may have been tempted to wipe out half the planet. We’ll never know.
A great read, chock full of exceptionally interesting characters like Agnes Smedley, Richard Sorge and Sandro Rado and another triumph for Mr Macintyre.
Top reviews from other countries
- BarbaraReviewed in Canada on November 9, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling!
MacIntyre never disappoints & Agent Sonya is another one of his well researched biographies. Written like a spy novel, it's hard to believe how a relatively innocuous wife & mother was one of the most effective Communist Spies who did so much damage to the West's military security from her activities in China, Switzerland and the UK. A real eye opener & a very enjoyable read.
- Nikolaos KatsimitrosReviewed in Germany on September 25, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Exciting Spy Story
A true and exciting spy story told by the master of its kind, Ben MacIntyre.
- Eswaran IyerReviewed in India on April 17, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding
Anyone who likes Le Carre….will greatly enjoy reading this book. Authentic in the real sense. McIntyre is a true master of historical fiction
-
Philippe M.Reviewed in France on June 3, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars une histoire incroyable d'un agent qui ne s'est jamais fait prendre
Sonya a été formée en partie par Sorge, et a échappé aussi aux purges stalinienne,
c'est toute l'histoire de la guerre froide!
-
João AlmeidaReviewed in Spain on January 23, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Om
Como o fanatismo político pode motivar uma pessoa